Sarah Palin Could See This Guy From Her House

On May 22, 2010, Joe McGinniss moved into a strategically well-situated house in Wasilla, Alaska. It was next door to the home of former Gov. Sarah Palin and her family, but that understates the highly exploitable proximity of the two places. They were very close together. The Palins could probably hear tweets from the newly hatched birds that Mr. McGinniss excitedly uses as filler for “The Rogue,” his book about his summer-long experiment in homesteading. “The grebe chicks have hatched!” he needlessly exclaims.

Tweets emanated from the Palin place too. But they were the kind that Mr. McGinniss could have monitored from home in Massachusetts.

Mr. McGinnis, who has been writing best sellers since “The Selling of the President” in 1969, starts this book by affecting a gee-whiz attitude about his amazing new digs. (“Forty years in the business and I’ve never had a piece of luck like this.”) But he doesn’t get far with that attitude. Ten pages into “The Rogue” he has already blown his cover, printing a map to the Palins’ isolated house. He describes having gone to the Palin door with a signed copy of his book about Alaska, “Going to Extremes,” and exploiting this encounter to engage the family’s older son, Track, in conversation. But had Mr. McGinniss been a good neighbor, he would have delivered that book without showing up unannounced.

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Joe McGinnissCredit
Nancy Doherty

Mr. McGinniss explains that he was shocked, just shocked, at the angry response his presence in Wasilla provoked. But “The Rogue” makes the Palins’ widely publicized anger understandable, even to readers who might have defended his right to set up shop in their neighborhood and soak up the local color. Although most of “The Rogue” is dated, petty and easily available to anyone with Internet access, Mr. McGinniss used his time in Alaska to chase caustic, unsubstantiated gossip about the Palins, often from unnamed sources like “one resident” and “a friend.”

And these stories need not be consistent. “The Rogue” suggests that Todd Palin and the young Sarah Heath took drugs. It also says that she lacked boyfriends and was a racist. And it includes this: “A friend says, ‘Sarah and her sisters had a fetish for black guys for a while.’ ” Mr. McGinniss did in 2011 make a phone call to the former N.B.A. basketball player Glen Rice, who is black, and prompted him to acknowledge having fond memories of Sarah Heath. While Mr. Rice avoids specifics and uses the words “respectful” and “a sweetheart,” Mr. McGinniss eggs him on with the kind of flagrantly leading question he seems to have habitually asked. In Mr. Rice’s case: “So you never had the feeling she felt bad about having sex with a black guy?”

So much for the soft sell. Soon Mr. McGinniss is settling in to enjoy the fuss his mere presence has created. “Normally, for a news story to continue beyond the first 24-hour news cycle, something newsworthy must occur,” he writes loftily, but “The Rogue” is filled with proof to the contrary. What was his hate mail like? He quotes it. What did Glenn Beck call him? That’s here too. Who took umbrage at this venom and chose to help him? One man offered him a hideout, despite Mr. McGinniss’s slight skepticism about his motives. “But you don’t know me,” Mr. McGinnis protested.

“Hell, I’ve even got an AK-47 you might like,” the man volunteered.

Is it any wonder that such shenanigans found their way to “Doonesbury”? The “Rogue”-related controversy has escalated this week with the news that some newspapers have declined to run installments of the comic strip that incorporate excerpts from the book. But what exactly is stopping them? Is it the book’s intrepid reporting, or its questionable tone? Mr. McGinniss’s most quotable, inflammatory lines call Ms. Palin a clown, a nitwit, a rabid wolf and a lap dancer — and those aren’t the parts that assail her as a wife and parent.

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Jake Guevara/The New York Times

He even finds a species of Alaska yenta willing to remark on the condition of the Palins’ toilet, and he too (many of these gossips are men) has a place in “The Rogue.” A journalist as seasoned as Mr. McGinniss surely knows what these details will do to his credibility regarding the book’s more serious claims.

“The Rogue” reopens many knotty arguments about Ms. Palin’s public record, mostly the same ones that were hashed over when she became part of the 2008 presidential campaign. It cites the investigation that became known as Troopergate, the questions about her involvement with the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (Mr. McGinniss covered this in a 2009 Portfolio article) and her possible commitment to such extreme theological ideas as dominionism, although here too “The Rogue” is too busy being nasty to be lucid. Mr. McGinniss suggests both that Ms. Palin is committed to stealth religious control of government, and that she is not sufficiently devout.

With the same imprecise aim he cites conspiracy theories that Ms. Palin may not be the mother of her youngest son, Trig, and questions the circumstances under which he was born. Mr. McGinniss puts forth a provocative case for doubting Ms. Palin’s account of Trig’s birth, which involved a round trip between Alaska and Texas while she was supposedly in labor. But then he comes to an indefensibly reckless conclusion: “It is perhaps the most blistering assessment of her character possible that many Wasillans who’d known Sarah from high school onward told me that even if she had not faked the entire story of her pregnancy and Trig’s birth, it was something she was eminently capable of doing.”

There is one area, and only one, in which “The Rogue” is dead-on. Mr. McGinniss knows how publicity works. He appreciates, not to say emulates, the way members of the Palin family cash in on celebrity and contradict themselves without penalty. He also denounces the press’s willingness to let this happen. How was it possible, he asks, for Ms. Palin’s daughter Bristol to assail Levi Johnston, the father of her son, as being “obsessed with the limelight,” then turn up herself on “Dancing With the Stars”?

Speaking of Mr. Johnston, Mr. McGinniss interviews his resentful mother, who was under house arrest on a drug charge at the time. He leaves her house “wanting to find Levi and give him a good hard shake and tell him to forget his sputtering career for half a second and go home, because his mother needs him.” Since absolutely nobody connected with “The Rogue” seems to lack ulterior motives, there is one here as well. Mr. Johnston’s sputtering career has produced a memoir, “Deer in the Headlights.” Next week it will compete for attention with “The Rogue,” when both are officially published on the same day.

THE ROGUE

Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

By Joe McGinniss

Illustrated, 321 pages. Crown Publishers. $25.

A version of this review appears in print on September 15, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: She Could See This Guy From Her House. Today's Paper|Subscribe